The world has ground to a halt for a number of months as Covid-19 has tragically spread rapidly, closing countries borders, taking airplanes from the skies and cars from the roads, teaching us all what “social distancing” means and that’s before we get to the economic or sociological effects of this pandemic and our response to it.

Pause. Stop. Breathe.

Is now the time for a reboot?

When we started Beautiful Everything we found ourselves adopting the phrase “Do more and say less” frequently. It’s a simple phrase that neatly delivers what we believe in. Through the careful consideration and focus on customer, audience or user needs, your organisation should be able to make greater differentiation and value by analysing and potentially adapting a product or service delivery, than it could ever do by purely shouting about it.

Businesses will only really succeed if they approach their future development from a holistic standpoint. Digital strategy (or its younger brother, IT strategy) needs to be aligned to an overall business/brand strategy, which might in turn inform marketing strategy, customer acquisition/retention strategy, recruitment strategy and many more internal strategies that a business should be considering.

if you’re interested in innovation and improving experiences then take the time to listen to what Beth’s got to say, but also explore, experiment, test, fail and fail fast in what you do. The end result will nearly always be better.

“You’re not really trying to sell to someone, you’re understanding a need”

We’re big believers in finding the expertise within the organization and helping those experts to tell their stories. It’s a technique Apple understand. Who better to explain a new piece of tech than the man behind the design. Jonny Ives is the perfect example of the quiet, non showman sort of design engineer who can explain just what it is about a new piece of tech that will make it an amazing part of our lives

There were several easy fixes that would have improved my experience of working with these delivery brands that could be identified by simply mapping out the customer experience as they engage with the service. This is where we like to start, we use a hybrid experience map that we’ve adapted for our needs to help us map what a customer might experience with a particular service.

This challenge of how we bring real innovation into our society/economy without it being affected by the problems of scale and bureaucracy (that can be the very death knell of the process that we’re trying to grow) is something that drives us. In order for this type of innovation to happen in larger organisations it’s going to take some very open thinking and collaboration to crack the real challenges that key decision makers face – something that some are going to find really uncomfortable or even too h

The presentation gives a taste of the content in the new book written with Jonathan Rosenberg. They describe how most companies are ‘slow by design’ and how to capitalise in a world where change is accelerating.

we all need to stop, think and work out why and what value does the new technology add? Take the time to be thoughtful in it’s use, inventive. Don’t use new technology for the sake of it being fresh, you’d be far better off using older technology in new and more productive and innovative ways.

Being an organisation that invests in product innovation and improved services should be central to delivering brand ambition and in turn market success.

We need to now use the technology at our disposal to create applications and experiences that assist us all in our human development. Help us to cope and understand the world around us in simplified and tuned in ways that feel complimentary and beneficial in our day to day lives, not intrusive and indicative of the era that has gone before.